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UNIVERSITY RESEARCH COMMERCIALIZATION 419

Process Flow Encourage Educate Enable

Idea Intake BU Outreach Faculty Bootcamp Online Invention
TDRR Disclosure Form
Terrier Tech

Commercialization Prepare with inventor Assessment of idea Thresholds trigger actions
Readiness Level

Strategy for Success BU Innovator of the Gap analysis Support improvement
Year award Plan for improvement Kindle Mentoring
GAP Funding iTeam Course

IP Protection BD mgr interaction Faculty Bootcamp Patenting
Licensing Faculty startups Kindle Mentoring Agreement templates
Industry sponsored New Venture Accelerator Incubator
research support Business Outreach
TDRR
Terrier Tech

Figure 3. OTD TTO platform processes.
Simply, successful platforms increase the quan- 1. Implementation of the organization into three
tity (Maximize Collisions) and quality (Minimize distinct teams:
Friction) of interactions between producers and a. Business Development (BD) team, whose
consumers. In 2006, of the top five publicly traded goal is to encourage faculty to submit inven-
companies by market capitalization, Microsoft was tion disclosures and to educate faculty on
the only platform company. By 2016, all of the top five how to commercialize their inventions.
were platform companies: Apple, Alphabet (parent of Additionally, BD’s goal was to create “colli-
Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. sions” between faculty and industry. BD
consists of people (mostly with industry
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AS A PLATFORM background) “who don’t like sitting in their
Our technology commercialization platform chairs” but are motivated to spend time in
model begins with the motto: Maximize Collisions, research labs at BU and interacting with
Minimize Friction . The idea behind “Maximize potential industry collaborators.
SM
Collisions” is to create as many “connections” between b. Intellectual Property & Licensing (IPL)
research (and researchers) at BU and industry as pos- team, whose goal is to manage all trans-
sible so that the “market” can inform researchers and actions, including patent filings and agree-
the OTD about commercially promising technolo- ments (i.e., the things that enable invention
gies. The goal of “Minimize Friction” is to simplify commercialization). Additionally, IPL’s goal
and make transparent processes to improve transac- was to minimize friction by improving
tions and make it a better experience for companies transaction processing. IPL consists of peo-
licensing BU inventions. From this motto, we devel- ple (mostly with a legal or patent back-
oped the following mission statement: “Encourage, ground) “who like sitting in their chairs”
Educate and Enable BU community to realize the and completing transactions.
commercial potential of their ideas.” Figure 3 details c. Operations (OPS) team, who managed
processes of the OTD platform. finance, administration, and human
Beginning in early 2010, we began to implement resources, including post-license compliance
the Maximize Collisions, Minimize Friction tech- and royalty distributions.
nology transfer platform at OTD, which involved 2. Implementation of a program to Maximize
the following steps: Collisions: